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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: December 25, 2002
Latest Update: December 25, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Making It Better:
The Cost of Repairing and Maintaining
A Just Educational Infrastructure

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, December 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on an New York Times article by Jacques Steinberg in the National section on December 25, 2002: Comeback School Holds Its Breath By Jacques Steinberg. Backup.

This story brings to mind the ugly underbelly of affirmative action. Affirmative action should have meant taking action to make possible a correction of the harm that had come to those who were discriminated against by unfair racist, ethnic, and gender policies. That correction usually required that money be spent, money that had often been unfairly held from these groups and used to enrich the entitlements and privilege of groups with the political power and connections to draw the benefits to themselves.

When action was taken and money was spent to make the school system better, it got better. But long before the educational level came anywhere near a par with the privileged schools of the past, other budget pressures arose, and we looked at the progressthe schools had made, and said, "enough, we need the money elsewhere, like for a war with Iraq." And so the support money dried up, and the conditions worsened again, and we found our educational system right back where it had started: privileged for those with power and money.

It's true we have to think a little harder here. We have to look beyond the medals staged in achievement celebrations. We have to think about the real costs of learning, to the system and to the student. And we need, most of all, to rethink the traditional American attitude that if you throw a little money at "situation," it will ameliorate the situation a little, and then we are all excused of complicity.

Discussion topics:

• Describe the state of denial in this situation.
• Describe the role of complicity and how it comes about in this situation.
• Give a reasoned argument on how the Burke is ordained to fail by removing the compensatory funds that led to its present achievement.
• Imagine you're running for Student Body President at Richville, with the current budget crisis. What would you argue for the "fair" distribution of budget resources?
• Imagine you're running for Student Body President at Jeremiah E. Burke High School, with the current budget crisis. What would you argue for the "fair" distribution of budget resources?